


Change is Slow

by yosjiefo



Category: Dangan Ronpa Zero, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Post-Canon, all the canon survivors get mentioned if not explicitly written but naegi and enoshima are the focus, vaguely alludes to sdr2 but the larger and more important reference is to major dr0 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:02:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29542770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yosjiefo/pseuds/yosjiefo
Summary: The killing game has ended and Junko Enoshima has agreed to not execute herself, but Makoto Naegi still extends a hand to her, believing she has more room to grow.
Relationships: Enoshima Junko & Naegi Makoto
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	Change is Slow

**Author's Note:**

> Written and featured in the Danganronpa Growth zine. Written in June of 2019. Takes place post-DR1 in an alternate universe where Junko survives. All other parts of DR1 and DR0 stay the same, however. 
> 
> Additionally, fair warning that I write in narration the first names to be more in-line with the newer fans who got into the game through the official localizations, but I write in dialogue surnames first usually because I had experienced the Oren fantranslation first, so it feels more 'right' to me with their character voices.

**SOMETIMES YOU DESTROY THE WORLD** but someone convinces you to pick up the pieces. The world had fallen to ruin, the flames had engulfed it, but someone would always have the nerve to say it’s not destroyed yet-- that you can fix it still. Worse yet, even if you proved to them that that’s just a fool’s errand, they’d turn it around and insist that it could be remade.

How irritating.

The world is still grey, the buildings have still been burnt, and the blood has still been stained. Tokyo doesn’t look anything like it had a year ago, but the rubble isn’t what stirs Junko’s heart and makes her feel a scatter of pricks on her skin. She looks outside the window of an old hotel, a place she stays at because this world no longer knows what home is after she’s ravaged them all, and she knows there will be a knock on her door soon enough.

 _Knock knock._ “Enoshima-san? Enoshima-san, it’s me. Naegi.”

Bingo. She cast a look at the door first and then the unused ashtray this room came with. She considers for a second quickly burning something to put in it so that Makoto might see it and get upset-- concerned or angry, maybe disappointed? 

“Enoshima-san, you’re there, right?”

The joy that would bloom from seeing such a reaction would only last a second though. Then she would have to deal with the consequence of everyone’s favorite meddler chastising her. 

She doesn’t even smoke.

“Enoshima-san, I’m sorry, but I know you’re in there. Kirigiri-san told me as such earlier, so…”

“Quit yappin’!! I heard ya, I heard ya!!” Junko crosses over towards the door, practically ripping it off its hinges with how forcefully opens it. She looks Makoto dead in the eye, snarl in her teeth and one of her hands smacking the wall next to her so she can lean against it. “Ever heard of some fuckin’ patience, huh?! You’re not the first in line to meet me so don’t even get me started!!”

She sees him widen his eyes in surprise but he adjusts quick enough to it. “So… have _they_ contacted you here?”

Junko knows exactly who he means by that. Fifteen faces float in her head, but she quickly banishes them. “No… they left poor me all alone by myself here…” She curls her fingers into her pigtails, combing them as she draws out melancholic tones into her voice, having quickly gotten tired of her previous personality with how soon Makoto worked with it.

In return, she gets a dubious look from him. “You’re not alone, Enoshima-san.”

“I’m alone because I don’t understand any of you… Please don’t put me in with the likes of you hope-loving freaks… I may have said I’m disbanding the SHSL Despair but that doesn’t change the despair-inducing superwoman I am…”

Makoto sighs. “Refusing to go with us also doesn’t change that…”

“Of course… This is the part where a normal Japanese homeowner tells their neighbor they can come in, right…? Come in, Naegi-chan…” Her welcome, though tongue-in-cheek, is accepted by her peer. He takes off his shoes in the entrance and walks into the hotel room with Junko close behind him. “Sorry about the mess…”

The room was spotless.

It looked like Makoto wanted to say something about it, but he changes course. “Thank you,” he says instead.

“You know,” Junko switches her lilting voice to something more starkly assertive and monotonous. She even whips out a pair of glasses from her pocket. “Your thanks are wasted words. We all say trifling things, small-talk, and for what purpose? It’s filler. You clearly have a point in coming here, whether it be to just be nosy and ask about me or to go drag me off somewhere.”

“I don’t think it’s pointless,” Makoto counters.

“Hm? And on what basis? Last time we checked, my talent is the far more useful one for this kind of work. There’s no need to fight me.”

“You-- You still do that, huh?” Makoto furrows his brow. “You say you gave up, but you didn’t really… You still think you’re right just like anybody else.”

“Aren’t you glaaaad about that?” Junko has discarded the glasses, ramping her doe eyes up to eleven alongside the saccharine pitch of her voice. “I’m perky and full of life! Or, ne, did you want me to be as emotive as a floundering and dying fish? I can do that!”

Before Junko can legitimately throw herself onto the ground, Makoto grabs her arm to keep her upright, pulling her a little closer to him. “No, that’s fine, Enoshima-san.”

“Boooo, you’re boring, Naegi-chaaan…”

Ignoring the insult, he lets go of her. “Anyway, as I was saying before, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thanking you. I know you say you were born with despair, but… that doesn’t mean you have to live in it forever.”

“Words truuuly only said by someone who hasn’t lived my life! Someone who hasn’t tasted the truest, sweetest, deepest drip of despair~!”

“Maybe not, but I can still feel empathy for you, Enoshima-san.”

At that, Junko’s face scrunches up. “Ew. Who asked you for something as revolting as pity? It sure as hell wasn’t me!”

“No, but you didn’t at first ask to be born feeling this way, did you? But you came to--” he carefully thinks, keeping her in suspense, before settling on, “--you came to love despair in a way.”

“Love, huh?” He must remember the way her eyes held a madness that captivated people, beckoned them to move forward and into the same rabbit hole she had a year ago or perhaps even longer before that. Her big smile, her excited laugh, they were the traits of someone infatuated but she had chosen to give all her affection to poison.

She wanted to share that love, and for her, that love meant burning the world down and painting it black and white and red with a metallic taste in your mouth.

Makoto nods. “I guess I want to make you love… hope. Make you feel happier, a little less of whatever is eating at you. ‘Thank you’ is a small thing to say, but a small thing can go a long way.”

This boy was full of greeting card sayings. Junko snorts, but even though it should’ve been seen as derisive, Makoto smiles back at her. It wasn’t a smile like the ones her disciples had given her. It was simple and emanated warmth.

Why?

She looks at him with wide eyes, like that smile could hurt her if he wore it long enough against her.

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“You know… that weird smirk on your face! There’s nothing to be laughing about!” Junko pouts which only serves to make Makoto’s look grow softer as he laughs. “Auuuugh, I hate you. You know, I can report you for discrimination for laughing at me!”

“I’m sorry, Enoshima-san. I was just happy to have a normal conversation with you.”

“Normal?” Junko made a funny face, trying to examine the other’s facial expression for _something_ deceptive. “Do you need your head checked?”

“Well, I guess it’s still a pretty far way from being _completely_ normal. The day we can talk without mentioning hope or despair sounds like a good thing.”

But how? It was the only thing she could live her life around. It had been like that since day one. Despair. Despair. Despair. Despair. Despair. Despair. Despair. Despair. Desp--

“Enoshima-san, do you want to go to the funeral?” Makoto looks out the window now, passing by her and asking without looking her in the face. Junko stares at his back, not quite seeing what he was.

“No.”

“You know, you can give it a shot,” he turns back to her, his voice gentle. “Asahina-san really wants to do this for everyone else.”

There was no way Aoi Asahina of all people asked for Junko Enoshima to attend. She knows the truth of who really wants her to be there to honor their fallen classmates. “You want someone who feels things about people. Is this your way of asking me to pretend like Ryoko Otonashi exists?”

She hadn’t said that name in a long time. Nobody had. But now it was out in the open.

“She really paid attention to people and loved them. She had a bottomless hole for her brain to make up for all the dumb thoughts in her head!” Junko’s speaking because Makoto seemed to refuse to. Until now.

“If Otonashi-san could feel things, can’t you too?”

It’s a genuine question, one of the worst types of phrases a human being can voice out loud. Rhetoricals were less annoying because at least everyone was on the same page. Real questions meant exposition and catching people up to speed, being dragged down by the ignorant.

Why couldn’t people just be able to look in her head and understand? Oh, even when they did, they didn’t really. That was the beauty of ignorance: it was inevitable. Even when someone had all the tools in their arsenal to know someone in and out, they still ended up too dumb to work out everything. Yasuke Matsuda was proof of that.

Even she, someone who knew all the ticks of her classmates, still got bested by them. The futility of the human condition was inescapable.

The joy of knowing that has worn off. An infant grows tired of a new toy eventually, and maybe that’s what happened here too. Instead, the knowledge just frustrates her and it’s not even the twisted fun kind of frustration.

So this was truly what defeat felt like.

Junko laughs to feel like it’s still as sweet as it once was. “Hya hya hyaaa!! Look at you, pathetically hoping for Ryoko Otonashi! The girl who never existed in the first place!”

“No, I’m not hoping,” Makoto replies. His eyes are stern, and for a moment Junko wonders if he’s gotten bored of his own personality too, but no, this is just the natural human spectrum of emotions. How disappointing.

“That’s all you do,” Junko spits.

“That’s all you _think_ I do. You’ve relegated me to that, but I don’t want to simplify you just into a beacon of despair or anything.”

“...Don’t you hate me? Why don’t you hate me?”

“I can hate you without wanting you dead, Enoshima-san,” he sighs. “But I can also learn to hate you a little less. You stepping away from whatever execution you had prepared was a sign of change, and I want to honor that.”

“Change is slow,” Junko answers, feeling suspicious of him for baring himself instead of keeping up that front of the golden hope boy. “Don’t you hate it? Hate how crawling it is? You could be waiting forever for me. I’ll never turn back into Ryoko Otonashi for as long as you let me keep my memory.”

An idea forms in her head, and she steps forward, pushing Makoto’s back against the window with the way she’s pressing her body against his.

“You can get rid of my memory. You can make me like Ryoko-chan and dumb all over again, if that’s what you want.”

She feels she’s cornered him. He trembles under her, and she’s one second away from laughing like a hyena when he puts his palm against her shoulder and pushes her back a bit.

“I don’t want that!”

“Huh.”

“Erasing your memory might help us, but it doesn’t help you,” Makoto explains, smoothing out his jacket again. “You choosing to live changes you more than forcing you to go back to being someone else does.

“Otonashi-san might be more like the kind of person Asahina-san might get along with naturally, but I think Asahina-san would realize it’s not perfect. Otonashi-san would forget her. She would have to go through everything again and again, relying on someone to remind her that we’re her friends. She’d make mistakes but not realize it, not be able to fix them and grow. She’d be stuck like that forever. I… wouldn’t want to do that to you. I want you to make memories and recall them yourself. I want you to look back at old pictures of yourself and be glad you’ve made it this far. I want you to _live_ , Enoshima-san.”

The silence in the hotel room is deafening, but something in the air feels a little lighter for his words having sliced through it.

* * *

“It’s Junko Enoshima-chan here to toast to the dead!!” the girl throws up a peace sign.

The six others in attendance to the makeshift funeral look back at the intruder with surprise as she stands in the entryway with a smug grin on her face. Their dumbstruck silence is cut off when Aoi pulls Makoto aside.

“Asahina-san?!”

“You really got her here?! How--?!”

He hadn’t, but he didn’t get to relay that he had never gotten the confirmation from Junko before she crashes into all of them, slinging them together with a surprising amount of strength-- or maybe it was just the shock of the moment that allowed everyone to put up no resistance to the fashionista.

“C’mon, we don’t got all day here!” she interrupts, taking out a polaroid camera. “Get all your asses into the shot! I’ve already gotta fit in all the ghosts in here, much less Hagakure’s crazy hair.”

“Hey, it’s not THAT crazy!”

Still, they all got together, huddling for an awkward group shot with Junko as the selfie cameraman.

“You want to be in the picture too, Enoshima-san?” Makoto asks, a bit surprised.

She looks back at him, a more easy look on her face. “Gotta take a picture so I can look at myself later, yeah?”

The flash goes off without a warning, the trademark to Junko’s spontaneity. Her whims dictate her wherever she goes, and right now it tells her to make something to gaze at later. It tells her to be here dressed up in black from head to toe. Most of all, it tells her to create something that she will neither expect nor even want to be destroyed.


End file.
